Category: War and Terrorism

The next 9-11. It’s only a matter of time. And the government is doing nothing to prevent it:

Security researcher Brian Wallace was on the trail of hackers who had snatched a California university’s housing files when he stumbled into a larger nightmare: Cyberattackers had opened a pathway into the networks running the United States power grid.

Digital clues pointed to Iranian hackers. And Wallace found that they had already taken passwords, as well as engineering drawings of dozens of power plants, at least one with the title “Mission Critical.” The drawings were so detailed that experts say skilled attackers could have used them, along with other tools and malicious code, to knock out electricity flowing to millions of homes.

Wallace was astonished. But this breach, The Associated Press has found, was not unique.

About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on, according to top experts who spoke only on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.

The public almost never learns the details about these types of attacks – they’re rarer but also more intricate and potentially dangerous than data theft. Information about the government’s response to these hacks is often protected and sometimes classified; many are never even reported to the government.

One of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre, Tashfeen Malik, sent at least two private messages on Facebook to a small group of Pakistani friends in 2012 and 2014, pledging her support for Islamic jihad and saying she hoped to join the fight one day, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday. The messages were posted before Malik, 29, entered the United States on a K-1 fiancée visa in July 2014, the Times said, citing two top federal law enforcement officials. Malik’s messages were recovered by FBI agents investigating whether she and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, had been in direct contact with foreign militant organizations and were directed to carry out the Dec. 2 attack in which 14 people were killed, the Times reported.

The suspected mastermind of the attacks that killed 129 in Paris was among those killed in a police raid in a suburb of the French capital on Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor said in a statement on Thursday. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian militant, who had boasted of mounting attacks in Europe for the Islamic State, was accused of orchestrating Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings. Police originally thought he was in Syria, but their investigations led them to a house in the Paris suburb of St. Denis and heavily armed officers stormed the building before dawn, triggering a massive firefight and multiple explosions.

The six-year-old company doesn’t discriminate when it comes to picking customers — even allegedly protecting dozens websites affiliated with ISIS — and it’s come under fire from some members of Anonymous as a result.

A video posted by Le Monde on Saturday shows a glimpse at the horrifying scene of dozens fleeing gunfire outside a concert hall in central Paris. The video, shot from an apartment balcony, shows a steam of people racing down a passageway in the building to a side street.